The really truth: i've tested Blender 2007 and now 2009. What are the whole programmers doing the last few years?!

The User Interface is so terrible and not intuitive.

Take a look at the $25 Carrarra. You need 5 Minutes to understand what the program is doing.

In Blender all Buttons und text are very small. And you have 3-4 same views und options, buttons ... and no preferences menu, no easy 3D view change, no 3 Button Mouse support at mac etc. etc. etc.

It is so difficult to build a new "User Friendly" GUI? Year for year blender comes with new features and films... but with the same lame GUI. I cant understand the politics. The first thing to a great program is the "GUI". Without a usable GUI every software is trash only. When the programmers will finally understand that easy thing?

I couldn't agree more. I come from Cinema 4D and it hurts to use Blender, even after spending many days on UI tutorials I still feel frustrated when I use Blender. All the small buttons at the bottom of the UI are annoying. Why not start by creating icons at the top with drop down menus similar to other applications.

The most talked about aspect of Blender is the unintuitive UI, so people hire a UI artist and get on with it? Blender will never reach it's potential without a more intuitive UI similar to other popular 3D applications.

There must be someone in the Blender community who can create an UI that is more intuitive and user friendly?

I suggest you spend $25 and buy yourself a copy of Carrera. You obviously prefer it above blender.

I apologize for my blunt reaction, but posts like this have become very tiresome. The developers ARE working on inproving blender in every possible way. Some things take more time.

If you would have read up on the site and the total of developement that has happened since blender went open source, you would not make such a first post.

Paint Guy,

Blender is a tool. It should be fun to use. If it doesn't fit your needs or workflow, or you constantly fight with it: don't use it.

Cinema 4D is an excellent tool, if you are efficient and it meets your needs, use it.

None of you are apparently aware of the major rewrites that have happened in the past and even less aware of the 2.5 rewrite

And no, a GUI you can't just slap on it like a sticker and call it done. It requires a lot of research and skill.

And ... because others have made mistakes concerning certain GUI paradigms, doesn't mean we have to make the same mistake again.

you know... (jk) i find windows unintuitive. when i press F12 the screen doesn't refresh. when i press TAB i don't go in edit mode so i can change the name of a file. and when i press X things don't delete.. Not to mention that CNTRL-Q doesn't close a window....

I found a link to a winter session where I think the GUI was being discussed, but I don't know if changing the GUI is something the Blender team is seriously considering.

If they are considering a change to the GUI, then I ask why now? Have they only now realized that the Blender GUI is very unintuitive?

GUI Ideas
If this community is Open Source could anyone (even myself) come up with a new interface design? I am a designer who has been studying good Interface Design and have some good ideas, but I do not know C++.

If a user had a very good design for a GUI, is there a possibility the good folks at Blender would implement some of the ideas or does the new GUI have to be designed internally?

As spring returns to the Northern Hemisphere, so does Yet Another Blender GUI Sucks (YABGS) thread. As anyone who has spent some time here knows, these all follow a familiar pattern:

- Blender does not look like $MY_FAVORITE_APPLICATION
- Other people should spend their time and energy make ME happy.
- followd by gratuitious insults and cursing
- amd finally, the thread gets locked by the moderators

So consider this a reminder to play nice. Some points to remember:

- No insults or cursing.
- Blender looks like it does because it was designed according to a set of principles based on the work of Jeff Raskin.
- Proposals and talk are cheap and in greater supply than coders.
- We have the source code. If we wanted Blender to look like Microsoft Word, it already would.
- Stiv's Law states that all Blender UI threads become meaningless and repetitive when the word 'intuitive' appears.

As far as I know, serious proposals that are well documented have a chance of being considered. It is highly likely that not everything gets in. You should try to contact one of the developers of the winter kamp if you mean business

After the 2.5 rewrite, the core of blender will have been build from the ground up, allowing easier development.
GUI things that were previously not possible, are now a possibility.
Macros and custom keymaps for instance.

I like blender's GUI. I like how the buttons are small, since they save space. I like how 3 button support is emulated through the usage of the "command" key. I like how the GUI is written entirely with python and opengl so that it can be used on like 4 or 5 different systems and still look the same. I like how developers are focusing on important features to make the program more professional.

P.S. - There is no "blender 2007" or "blender 2009" (if there was, wouldn't there be a 2006. Blender uses a version numbering system.

P.S.S. - To answer your first question,

What are the whole programmers doing the last few years?!

, they "are" been wasting time with these silly releases. You're absolutely right. These volunteer developers should have spent more time on the GUI, and less time making a decent working program comparable to the "really" programs you've been using.

Paint Guy wrote:I found a link to a winter session where I think the GUI was being discussed, but I don't know if changing the GUI is something the Blender team is seriously considering.

If they are considering a change to the GUI, then I ask why now? Have they only now realized that the Blender GUI is very unintuitive?

We have extensively discussed the GUI during the Wintercamp. It has always been, and always will be important for us to make sure the GUI is as good as it can get.

Sure, there is room for a whole lot of improvement, and we do work on the GUI.

As for changing the GUI, no, it won't be changing in the sense of "It should look like X or Y". There is now increased focus here, since we are working on some critical subsystems that finally allow for working on the GUI in a much better way. The changes we are going to make are improvements and will be building on design concepts that have been already in Blender and proven to be good.

Paint Guy wrote:
If this community is Open Source could anyone (even myself) come up with a new interface design? I am a designer who has been studying good Interface Design and have some good ideas, but I do not know C++.

If a user had a very good design for a GUI, is there a possibility the good folks at Blender would implement some of the ideas or does the new GUI have to be designed internally?

Of course people can participate. Write proposals with good argumentation, and make sure they adher to main design principles (some reports should be available Soon<tm> - check the news and the blender 2.5 wiki pages for updates on that).

Paint Guy wrote:
If this community is Open Source could anyone (even myself) come up with a new interface design? I am a designer who has been studying good Interface Design and have some good ideas, but I do not know C++.

If you don't know C++, you can always try to learn it. (Actually, Blender is coded mainly with C, not with C++, which has shown to be one of the success decisions behind Blender, because C++ is very poorly designed programming language).

You know, the amount of interface designers is about 1000 x times the amount of programmers with time and skills to implement the design suggestions. Most of the design suggestions have not improved the computer programs by any mean. Most of the design suggestions are endeed very poor.

So, try to learn programming, because you need it to implement your ideas.

What I can see about the suggested "$25 Carrarra" 3d-animation toolkit, it looks a horrible mess to me. Why are you suggesting something like that? And show us, please, what are your ideas about the user interface, and how would you like to begin to realize them? Make your own small program first, test your design there, show it to others, show the code behind the programm. This way you get people interested about your ideas.

You're just wrong, snifi.
Interface design and coding require radically different skillsets with little or no intersections. Coders are mostly horrible UI designers.
So, OSS projects can't afford good interface designers? Well, Paint Guy has just offered his help for free and what did he get in response - "Learn C"? What a joke. That doesn't make any sense at all. That's just so wrong on so many levels.

Anyway, I think Blender 2.5 looks very promising. What I like about, say, Maya is that its interface is completely customizable (it's almost entirely written in MEL/Python). I think Blender moves in that direction, too, and it's great.

snifi wrote:

Paint Guy wrote:
If this community is Open Source could anyone (even myself) come up with a new interface design? I am a designer who has been studying good Interface Design and have some good ideas, but I do not know C++.

If you don't know C++, you can always try to learn it. (Actually, Blender is coded mainly with C, not with C++, which has shown to be one of the success decisions behind Blender, because C++ is very poorly designed programming language).

You know, the amount of interface designers is about 1000 x times the amount of programmers with time and skills to implement the design suggestions. Most of the design suggestions have not improved the computer programs by any mean. Most of the design suggestions are endeed very poor.

So, try to learn programming, because you need it to implement your ideas.

What I can see about the suggested "$25 Carrarra" 3d-animation toolkit, it looks a horrible mess to me. Why are you suggesting something like that? And show us, please, what are your ideas about the user interface, and how would you like to begin to realize them? Make your own small program first, test your design there, show it to others, show the code behind the programm. This way you get people interested about your ideas.

There are tons of people who tried Blender, hated the UI and just uninstalled it. He's one of them I guess. So that's the area where Blender has most problems. I know, Blender has a lot of users, but with all its features it could (and should) have tons more.
That's where it can really, really use some help from people who can think in terms of design, usability, learning curve, stuff like that.
Of course, suggestions like "Make it work like Max" doesn't help at all. That's just lame. Anyone can say stuff like that.

@stiv:
New creative comments? darn, not my 15 year old responses... mmm...
I'll give it a try.

@blender critics:
As far as I know very talented ( o, wait, with degrees in (G)UI even ) have been working on the UI and GUI of blender. Claiming that this didn't happen is just an insult towards these talented people, and frankly I don't see how insulting them will get them on your side.

Saying that coders cant UI is just labeling. Like saying whites cant dance.
Blender, from the start, has been a creative tool made by creatives. And mind you, the Nederlands dans theater is venerated all over the world. I'm well aware that its not ballroom or hip-hop. But I didn't start this comparing game now did I ?
Quality and Taste are just not on the same scale. Trying to do so is... euh... dumb ( sorry for my lack of a better word ).

Frankly... Only real creatives understand blender, the rest are just ( yes just ) engineers.
Go buy Autocad or 3d Max or Cinema ( if you want to render on a mac render farm, lol ) and leave Blender for the creative people. Cause you'll be much more happy constructing your "art" with another app. Real creatives have been responsable for current (G)UI. And their capability for being creative has been proven beyond the doubt by a far larger group than the GUI complainers that skuff around here.

As I'm been accused for trolling by some of the smallest people I know I will not respond to any quotations of this post. If its unclear what I mean then just read it again and place the emphases on other words.

ruslanm wrote:
Interface design and coding require radically different skillsets with little or no intersections.

If there is no intersection between interface design and coding, then the interface design will not get implemented. That's because without programming there exists no functional programm. If you want your design ideas to get real, you need to implement them. That is something I'm asking you to do.

ruslanm wrote:
Well, Paint Guy has just offered his help for free and what did he get in response - "Learn C"? What a joke.